If using PPC marketing, what will make better sales/leads? Direct trafics to your own site or to the advertisers' sites?
Sometimes threads get lost becasue of all the posts - or people who might know the answer only come every few days. Using PPC to driving traffic right to the advertiser's site will give you better results, but many companies have in their terms and conditions that you aren't allowed to do that. To, you will run into issues getting your ads to show in AdSense since Google only allows one occurance of the display URL to show. So if you are driving traffic to www. BigWidgetStore.com/index.asp?affid=101010 and your display URL is www. BigWidgetStore.com and BigWidgetStore (or some other affiliate) already has that as the display URL, your ad won't show. PPC in terms of point of sale is very difficult to be profictable with in affilaite marketing. Better to get out there on a ton of low volume related terms, drive clicks as cheap as you can, and use it more as a branding campaign to get people to your site.
Thanks iShopHQ. I know the final success for affiliates is to make your own website porpular instead of directing trafics to the advertisers. My site was set up for the purpose of recruiting tiered affiliates at the very beginning. It was not doing much good for almost a year. Recently I changed the site content pretty much to a shopping directory. Haven't made much commission yet, but do spent about $20,000 on google, yahoo...in the past year with very low bid/click. Now under the google's new keyword system, seems like i need to raise the daily budget a lot more to keep most of my keywords activated...Guess i just need to hang in there to see what more will come.
Put as much effort as you can into generating organic traffic. I spend about 15$ a day in AdWords, but it's break even at best. Plus you can't track point of sale with Affiliate vendors because you don't own their web site. All you can do is voodoo the numbers to try to figure things out. I know how much I make a day (average) I know how many average visitors a day I get When I divide it out, each visitor is worth 8 cents So by paying 8 cents or less in PPC I figure I'm at least breaking even. Hopefully, I might be a little ahead on PPC visitors since it's more targeted, but who knows?